John Milius

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John Milius - E[ix and The USC School of Cinematic Arts Present a special Screening of "MILIUS". Milius will premiere on Epix on Saturday January 11 at 8pm. Milius examines the life story of one of the most influential and controversial film directors in the history of Hollywood, John Milius. - LA, California, United States - Friday 10th January 2014

A biography of iconic filmmaker John Milius, this engaging documentary features some of the biggest stars of all time talking about their friend who changed the movies forever. And he's got such a huge presence that we love listening to his stories almost as much as we've loved watching his films over the decades. This movie also explores his controversial image as a right-wing gun lover, but the salient fact is that his friends and colleagues clearly love him dearly.

John Milius has always been a man's man. His asthma prevented him from joining the military, so he instead went to film school in the 1960s with a group that included Lucas, Spielberg, Coppola and Scorsese. And these young turks were exactly what cinema needed as the studio system ended. Milius' uncredited screenplay for Dirty Harry got him work as a writer and director, and his crowning achievement remains the screenplay for Apocalypse Now. He's also proud of his passion project Big Wednesday, an iconic surfing film that vanished without a trace when the studio abandoned it. But everything changed with Red Dawn, the teen fantasy that gave him his pro-gun reputation as a pariah. He's been less busy since, but is still working on his long-gestating epic about Genghis Khan, even though he has spent the past few years recovering from a debilitating stroke.

Like Milius himself, this is a beefy, jovial movie that zips along at a fast pace, observing telling details everywhere without any real criticism. Milius calls himself a "zen anarchist" rather than a conservative, and it's fascinating to see his life-loving personality emerge in the clips. Meanwhile, we see all of the iconic lines he's written and cinema-changing moments he's had a hand in, from writing Robert Shaw's amazing USS Indianapolis speech in Jaws to teaching Arnold Schwarzenegger how to hold a sword for Conan.

Wu Tang leader turned actor turned director RZA will follow-up his directorial debut The Man With the Iron Fists with a biopic on Mongol leader Genghis Kahn, the Hollywood Reporter has revealed.

RZA is teaming up with filmmaker John Milius to bring Genghis Khan to the big screen, with Milius providing the massive screenplay and RZA stepping behind the camera again. The hip-hop legend has another project up his sleeves too, as it has also been announced that he will helm the upcoming action thriller No Man’s Land.

The proposed biopic has been in the pipeline for years now, with Milius having written the screenplay and signing on as executive producer for some time now. It is with the announcement that RZA will direct that the film has finally been given some kind of confirmation that it will come into fruition in the near future, although an exact date has not been given yet. Andre Morgan and Peter Lam have signed on to produce the project, with filming expected to begin next year in China, where RZA filmed most of TMWTIF.

Just issued on a remastered DVD, Coppola's 1979 masterpiece gets the director's cut treatment in this Redux version, as 49 minutes of previously edited footage are reinserted to bring the film in line with the director's original vision.

And the result is stunning, making an astonishing film even more powerful ...

For a portrait of cinematic obsession and unbridled megalomania rarely seen outside of a Werner Herzog home movie, one would be hard pressed to find a more satisfying piece of work than Hearts of Darkness, co-directors Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper's 1991 documentary on the making of Apocalypse Now. It was a film that didn't make sense; in fact it had never really made sense. Orson Welles had tried to make a film out of Joseph Conrad's Hearts of Darkness back in the 1930s -- that didn't work so he went ahead and made Citizen Kane instead. Nobody in the mid-1970s seemed interested in a film about the nation's just-ended nightmare, the Vietnam War, much less one with a murky and heady script based on a dense novel people had to suffer through in high school. The film as planned was going to cost far too much money before it even started to go insanely over budget.

But none of that was going to stop wunderkind Francis Ford Coppola from mortgaging every last ounce of the Hollywood credit he had garnered from making The Godfather Parts I and II (not to mention most every penny he had to his name) and hauling his family along with an army-sized cast and crew off to the Philippines (in the middle of an ugly civil war, mind you) for a few years to make a film whose ending he hadn't quite yet figured out. The results were perhaps predictable, even before the monsoons destroyed most of the sets, he fired his lead actor, and star Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack. When Apocalypse Now premiered at Cannes in 1979, a still-shaken Coppola announced that what had was that he had gone into the jungle -- like the Americans into Vietnam, in yet another of his grandiose analogies -- with too much money, too much equipment, "and little by little we went insane."

I wonder if someone tossed a copy of Red Dawn into Ronald Reagan's casket before they buried the old guy. I can't imagine a movie he would have loved more. A highly absurd Gipper-era relic, it makes the "Evil Empire" days of 1984 seem like a million years ago. Anyone under the age of 35 will watch this propaganda exercise about a terrifyingly successful Soviet invasion of small-town America and say, "Huh???"

Ignoring the outrageous jingoism for a minute, it should be noted that the movie does have plenty of forward momentum, starting from the moment when a bunch of Wyoming high schoolers (all '80s A- and B-list Brat Packers) look out their classroom window and see a huge number of paratroopers dropping into town. The soldiers who don't speak Russian speak Spanish. It seems that the Soviets have made a successful nuclear first strike (hey, that's cheating!) and have joined forces with ominously swarthy Cuban and Nicaraguan troops to storm a suddenly crippled America. The kids don't know all of this yet, though. All they know is that one of the soldiers has murdered their teacher right in front of them. Godless Commies!

In the grand tradition of movies that explore the reality that is the Vietnam War, one film stands out -- for defying reality.

Martin Sheen stars as Captain Willard, sent upriver in war-torn 'Nam to "terminate, with extreme prejudice" one Colonel Kurtz (Brando), a former green beret who has gone primal all the way in Cambodia and has taken on the guise of a god to the local people of the area.

I thought I was being all clever when I thought I'd compare Farewell to the King to Apocalpyse Now and The Mosquito Coast. Little did I know that director John Milius wrote the script for Apocalypse. Oh well.

King is a story about an American soldier (Nick Nolte, looking a lot like he does now in real life), who deserts his WWII P.O.W. march on an island in Borneo and escapes into the jungle. Years later (the war is still raging), he's discovered by British soldiers: He's now a "king" of the local people -- headhunters -- and he no longer wears a shirt. The Brits convince him to join the fight agains the Japanese again, and he reluctantly agrees, training the soldiers for a giant battle ahead.

I wonder if someone tossed a copy of Red Dawn into Ronald Reagan's casket before they buried the old guy. I can't imagine a movie he would have loved more. A highly absurd Gipper-era relic, it makes the "Evil Empire" days of 1984 seem like a million years ago. Anyone under the age of 35 will watch this propaganda exercise about a terrifyingly successful Soviet invasion of small-town America and say, "Huh???"

Ignoring the outrageous jingoism for a minute, it should be noted that the movie does have plenty of forward momentum, starting from the moment when a bunch of Wyoming high schoolers (all '80s A- and B-list Brat Packers) look out their classroom window and see a huge number of paratroopers dropping into town. The soldiers who don't speak Russian speak Spanish. It seems that the Soviets have made a successful nuclear first strike (hey, that's cheating!) and have joined forces with ominously swarthy Cuban and Nicaraguan troops to storm a suddenly crippled America. The kids don't know all of this yet, though. All they know is that one of the soldiers has murdered their teacher right in front of them. Godless Commies!

The first sequel to Dirty Harry proved a mildly entertaining winner, as vigilantes start offing the unconvicted mobsters of San Francisco. Harry himself isn't much more ethical, creating a moral dilemma... yeah, right! Mindless shooting and car chasing follows, along with the most-ever shots of the Golden Gate Bridge on film. Note that the cinematography is particularly awful in this movie -- most of which happens in the dark.

Jack Ryan returns for a third outing in Clear and Present Danger, reuniting Harrison Ford's Ryan with director Phillip Noyce, who also directed Ford-as-Ryan in Patriot Games.

Too bad that with plenty of raw material (notably Willem Dafoe as an American mercenary working in Columbia), Danger comes up awfully short. For starters, what is our CIA hero doing poking around in the Colubian drug trade? Sure, he's rooting out a huge conspiracy that goes all the way up the U.S. political ranks, but must we be subjected to endless Latino stereotypes en route to that? Clancy is always at his best when he's dealing with terrorists or Russians. Here we have a plot (nearly 2 1/2 hours in length) that trots out the usual exploding drug factories and endless cartel assassinations. Ryan's escape from a troublesome mission is infamous for the bad guys' repeated inability to hit a near-motionless target.